Attack on Prisons & Police Stations, Release of Militants, and Police Killings in Bangladesh (July-August 2024)

Bangladesh’s history bears the scars of a rare and chilling crime: The use of prisons as sites of political violence. That grim chapter first unfolded in 1975 and, nearly five decades later, resurfaced in 2024 under vastly different circumstances, yet with disturbingly similar consequences.

On November 3, 1975, less than three months after the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, four of the country’s most senior national leaders were brutally killed inside Dhaka Central Jail. The victims, former Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam, former Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad, M. Mansur Ali, and A. H. M. Qamaruzzaman, then president of the Bangladesh Awami League, were key architects of the 1971 Liberation War.

The killings, carried out by renegade elements of the military, came with state patronage and followed the August 15, 1975, assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most members of his family. November 3 marked the first-ever attack on a prison in Bangladesh’s history, leaving an indelible stain on the nation’s post-independence narrative.